Trevor Cook on public relations, social media and politics

Tag Archives: future of journalism

Journalism – a defence

November 6, 2009 – 11:56 am

It’s easy to take the piss out of journalists, and to blame the media for everything.
Journalists often over-estimate how much they know, and exaggerate their own importance.
But they’re not alone in having those shortcomings.
Where you sit is where you stand.
And people in different sectors of our complex democracy are quick to identify and lampoon the [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Social Media | Also tagged , , | Comments (13)

Hartigan and the future of newspapers

July 2, 2009 – 9:19 am

Newspapers have been declining in prominence and relevance for decades, well before the Internet and bloggers came along.
Many newspaper titles have disappeared altogether, or have been merged, in response to the growth of radio and television. The emergence of the Internet simply reduces the market for newspapers even further. Newspapers will not disappear altogether, the [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Internet, Media | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)

Can Arianna Huffington save journalism?

April 8, 2009 – 12:42 pm

Jeff Jarvis thinks so:  ”It has come to this: Arianna Huffington is saving journalism. In all the mourning and mewling over the impending death of newspapers, the oft-heard cry is that without them, there will be no investigative reporting, no one to dog the powerful. But now the indefatigable founder of The Huffington Post comes [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Newspapers, Social Media | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

Managers, not internet, cause newspaper deaths

April 3, 2009 – 7:53 am

Virtually every newspaper in the country has experienced a sharp drop in advertising and is suffering losses. But not every newspaper company in the country has gone bankrupt as a result. And the failures may say more about a style of capitalism than an industry. Each company was undone in large measure by really stupid [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Newspapers | Comments (0)

“Share all you know” – database journalism

March 31, 2009 – 9:23 am

At the Good Ideas Salon in London, Simon Waldman, head of digital at the Guardian, discussed the future of journalism and how the Guardian is adapting to a rapidly changing industry. In his talk, Simon presents ways the Guardian has transformed with the upheaval of old media models, choosing to embrace new approaches to storytelling, [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media | Also tagged | Comments (0)

One-stop media death watch site

January 9, 2009 – 2:09 am

Finding it hard to keep up with the growing torrent of bad news about traditional media? Well, this Canadian site (“Traditional publishing RIP”) provides an aggregation of grim headlines from around the web and around the world. Gee, there does seem to be a lot of it. (Warning: If you’re a journalist, the frequency with [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

Blogging is far more important than journalism

December 31, 2008 – 4:14 pm

Journalists have a tendency to assume that bloggers want to be journalists, despite the fact that few bloggers make such a claim. The assumption is that journalism is serious stuff (’first draft of history’, ‘critical for democracy’, ’speaking truth to power’ you know the spiel) and blogging is not.
Of course, this assumption always measures the [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Social Media | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Whose content is it anyway?

December 7, 2008 – 5:15 pm

The media prides itself on generating much of the content that bloggers, tweeters, facebookers etc thrive on. A journalist friend recently rebuked me: 
I think there’s always a big danger of becoming so obsessed with ‘platforms’ that you forget about the content. And in my experience, at least 50 percent of social media involves commenting on, [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Public Relations, Social Media | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

What will the world look like after the media is gone?

December 3, 2008 – 9:27 am

Bloggers love to speculate about the death of the media and the death of journalism. They’ve been doing it for years. Big-time bloggers, Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer, are at it again. A new round of speculation, this time trying to envisage what our world would like if the media did actually die. Dave Winer, [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Internet, Media, Newspapers, Online, Social Media, radio, television | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

More on Twitter and the future of news

November 29, 2008 – 8:31 am

Gigaom: “And that’s when I realized that the future of media is being split into two streams: one that consists of raw news that comes like a torrent from sources such as Twitter, mobile messages and photos, the other, from old media. The eyewitness dispatches (and photos) via social media are an adjunct to the [...]

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